by Stephen King
Part of Four Past Midnight
First published 1990
Flight 29 takes off from Los Angeles headed to Boston. Somewhere over the country, the plane punches through something it shouldn't. When it lands, the airport is empty. The city is empty. Everything is empty. Eleven passengers walked away from that flight alive, and every one of them would trade that luck in a heartbeat. Brian Engle is the pilot. He landed the plane. He did his job. Now he has to figure out what job comes next when civilization has simply stopped. The survivors move through a Boston that looks exactly right and feels completely wrong. Buildings stand. Roads stretch out. Nothing moves. No bodies, no wreckage, no explanation. Just absence, total and spreading in every direction. The tension is not about monsters or explosions. It is about what people do when the context that holds them together is gone. These eleven people were strangers on a red-eye. Now they are all that is left of anything. King keeps the stakes intimate even as the scale turns enormous. The emotional core is simple and brutal: survival means nothing if there is nothing left to survive for.
Genres: fiction, drama, science-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller, apocalyptic
Vibes: atmospheric, existential, haunting, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, mystery-unfolding, stranger-to-allies, survival-against-odds
Setting: Los Angeles, Boston, Flight 29
9 pages · Audio Cassette · Penguin/HighBridge Audio
Content warnings: death